A federal regulator calls the largest U.S. power grid "untenable" — and the problem isn't the wires

Climate & Energy 4 min 77 sources

PJM keeps 65 million people supplied across 13 states, but a FERC commissioner says its consensus-run stakeholder process has "ground into gridlock" — while a $100-billion grid buildout waits on decisions it can't make.

Key takeaways

A FERC commissioner called PJM, the largest U.S. grid operator serving 65 million people, "untenable" — its consensus-based stakeholder process has ground into gridlock.
The jam comes as the grid needs to grow fast: a $3.26 billion federal loan for Texas transmission and Duke's $103 billion plan show the scale of buildout — and the fight over who pays.
Quietly, African nations secured $900 million more for clean cooking, one of the highest-return energy investments there is, now past $3.1 billion total.

The grid that can’t decide

The biggest electricity grid in the United States is stuck, and this week a federal regulator said so out loud. David LaCerte, a commissioner at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — the agency that oversees the interstate power system — said PJM’s “status quo is really untenable” [1]. He was speaking Thursday in Philadelphia at a meeting of WIRES, a group that lobbies for the companies that build transmission lines [1].

PJM is not a household name, but it runs the grid and the wholesale power market for 65 million people across 13 mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states plus Washington, D.C. [1]. It is, LaCerte said, the largest grid operator in the country. And its process for making decisions has, in his words, “continued to just grind into gridlock” [1].

Here is the mechanism worth understanding. PJM doesn’t decide things by vote of a board. It runs on a stakeholder process — the utilities, power-plant owners, big industrial buyers, and consumer advocates who use the grid all sit in committees and hash out the rules together, aiming for broad agreement. That works when everyone wants roughly the same thing. It seizes up when they don’t.

When “everyone agrees” becomes “no one can move”

LaCerte’s specific complaint is the sharp part. Some players, he said, use the stakeholder process “to defend their business interests to the detriment of the wider region” [1]. His example: power generators who dislike a recent cap on how high capacity prices can go now use the consensus machinery to block change — even though that same machinery is what produced the cap they hate in the first place [1]. “We can’t have a group of stakeholders that are incentivized to vote one way economically that are driving us into the ground for an entire region of the country,” he said [1].

FERC is holding a technical conference on July 23 aimed squarely at PJM’s governance — including “fast-path” procedures to push urgent decisions through the logjam [1]. LaCerte pointed out that other regional grid operators run more smoothly, so PJM can “pick and choose” fixes that work elsewhere [1].

He also flagged a related habit: FERC hands out financial incentives to companies that build transmission — an extra half-percent return for joining a regional grid, and the right to charge customers for a project while it’s still under construction — then “put[s] it on a shelf and not revisit[s] it for 20 years” [1]. Rules set for one era quietly keep paying out in another.

Why this matters while demand is exploding

The gridlock lands at the worst possible moment, because the physical grid needs to grow fast. On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Energy closed a loan of up to $3.26 billion to a Texas subsidiary of American Electric Power to finance about 100 transmission projects across roughly 2,800 miles of line [22]. The upgrades will roughly double the carrying capacity of existing wires and are meant to serve surging demand from data centers, factories, and Permian Basin oil and gas [22]. AEP Texas says it has signed agreements supporting up to 41 gigawatts of potential new load by 2030 [22] — 41 GW is roughly the output of 40 large power plants.

That buildout has to be paid for, and the fight over who pays is already loud. In North Carolina, Duke Energy — which has filed a $103 billion capital plan, the largest of any regulated U.S. utility — spent a seven-hour hearing this week defending a residential rate increase it had already trimmed from 18% to 11.6% [65]. A state commissioner noted that Duke’s queue of large new customers is 70% data centers and asked, bluntly, how ordinary households are supposed to fund the spending [65]. “With my customer shoes on… I don’t see how you can say that we’re benefiting customers,” he said [65].

Wires, prices, and who connects when — those are exactly the questions a grid operator’s rulebook decides. When the rulebook can’t be updated, the decisions don’t stop; they just get made slowly, or by whoever benefits from delay.

The under-covered story: cleaner fires for three billion people

Away from the grid fights, the International Energy Agency said Thursday that African countries have secured $900 million in new commitments to expand clean cooking [17]. That builds on $2.2 billion pledged at a 2024 summit in Paris, bringing the total past $3.1 billion [17].

“Clean cooking” sounds minor and isn’t. Roughly two billion people worldwide still cook over wood, charcoal, or dung, and the household smoke is one of the largest environmental killers on earth. The money funds cleaner stoves and fuels — bottled gas, bioethanol — and the infrastructure to deliver them. It rarely makes headlines because it’s spread across health, forests, and climate at once, and its beneficiaries are poor and rural. But dollar for dollar, few energy investments do more good.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

Why the power to say "no" belongs to whoever likes things the way they are

When a system runs on agreement, everyone gets a veto — and a veto is the one tool the winners of today need to freeze tomorrow in place.

A grid held hostage by its own rulebook

The largest power grid in the United States is stuck, and the reason isn’t a shortage of wires or money. It’s a decision process. PJM — which keeps the lights on for 65 million people across 13 states — makes its rules by getting the players who use the grid to agree. A federal regulator just called that “untenable” and said it has ground into gridlock.

Notice what the grid is not short of. It has federal loans lining up, utilities filing hundred-billion-dollar plans, developers eager to connect. What it lacks is the ability to change its own rules. The machine that decides works fine at handing out yeses when everyone already wants the same thing. It jams the moment someone doesn’t.

The quiet gift inside “everyone must agree”

Consensus sounds fair. No one gets steamrolled; every voice counts. But look at what it actually hands out: it gives every player a veto. And a veto is not a neutral tool. It is worth the most to whoever is already winning.

The regulator’s own example makes this concrete. Some power generators dislike a recent cap on prices. They can’t easily pass a new rule to remove it — that would need broad agreement, and others benefit from the cap. But they don’t need to pass anything. They just need to block. So they use the consensus process not to build, but to freeze. The strange part, the regulator pointed out, is that the same process gave them the cap they hate in the first place. Whichever way the wind once blew, the machinery now serves standing still.

This is the pattern under the news: a rule that requires agreement quietly transfers power to the side that wants nothing to change. To make something happen, you must assemble everyone. To stop it, you only have to be one person who says no. The status quo always has that person, because the status quo always has a winner, and the winner always has a reason to protect it.

Why the status quo is never neutral

It’s tempting to think of “the current rules” as a resting state — just how things are until someone decides otherwise. They aren’t. Every arrangement was a choice someone made, and it left some people ahead and others behind. The generators didn’t inherit their position from nature; a past decision set it. That decision now looks like the ordinary background, which is exactly what makes it powerful. A choice that poses as a plain fact doesn’t have to defend itself.

So when a governance system says “we’ll only change things everyone agrees to,” it isn’t staying neutral between the sides. It is siding — silently, structurally — with whoever the last set of choices favored. Fairness in the room becomes unfairness over time, because the room can only ratify, never move.

You have seen this everywhere

Once you can see the shape, it’s everywhere agreement is required. The United Nations Security Council, where one permanent member’s “no” stops the other fourteen. A condo board where a single holdout blocks the roof repair everyone else needs. A jury where one juror hangs the verdict. A family where the person happiest with the plan can veto the trip by simply not agreeing. In each, the power isn’t in making things happen — it’s in preventing them, and that power flows to whoever the current arrangement already suits.

The fix is never “try harder to agree.” It’s structural: build a fast lane that doesn’t need everyone, price the cost of blocking so obstruction isn’t free, or move the decision to a body that can act. That’s precisely what the regulator is now reaching for — “fast-path” procedures that route around the veto. You don’t dissolve gridlock by asking the blockers to be nicer. You change who has to say yes.

The part that includes you

It’s easy to read this as a story about distant committees, and to feel a little superior to the people stuck in them. Don’t. You are downstream of PJM’s gridlock whether you’ve heard of it or not — in the price on your electricity bill, in how fast cheaper power can reach the wires, in whether the grid holds up on the next brutally hot night. The blocking happens in rooms nobody watches, and the cost lands quietly on everyone who was never in them.

And the harder thing to hold: you are the winner-who-vetoes somewhere too. Everyone is, on the arrangements that happen to favor them — the seniority, the schedule, the deal, the rule that reads as normal because it’s normal for you. Seeing the shape doesn’t put you above it. It just means that the next time a change stalls and you’re relieved, you might notice why — and hold your own “no” a little more honestly.

03 · Lab · your turn

Who Gets to Say No

Rehearse how a unanimity rule hands a veto to whoever profits from the status quo — and how changing the decision rule, not the minds, is what breaks the gridlock.

04 · Hope · carry this

Gridlock feels like fate, but it's only a rule — and rules are the one thing we have always known how to rewrite. Better-run grids already exist to copy from, which means the fix isn't a mystery, just a decision still waiting to be made.